Michael Pohl workshop

Last Thursday I attended our cluster worksop at Coley Street School to listen to Michael Pohl. Funny thing was he turned up at my school - he got lost in Foxton (I told him not to tell anyone that), so I took him to Coley Street School. Michael talked to our cluster about developing a classroom culture of thinking. Wow, this guy really knows what he's on about - and he talks really fast. My head was spinning at the end of the day with all his wonderful ideas. He shared with us what to "do" to develop a culture of thinking and our main learning intention needs to be to enhance the questioning ability of our students. I absolutely believe this and remember back to a past staff meeting where we discussed the skill of questioning needs to be explicit and specific, so in order to do that we as "effective" teachers need to become good at questioing too. We need to discuss as a staff what are the qualities and attributes of good thinkers? More importantly for our school - what is good thinking around here? This is an aspect where we will as a staff explore more deeply. On debriefing with staff the next day after they attended the Michael Pohl workshop that afternoon as well, they were inspired by him and also some were buzzing that their practices were confirmed by him - use 6 hats, use blooms taxonomy, use all sorts of tools to enhance students ability to question and therefore to think. I must say the most intriguing part of our day with Michael was hearing how him and his wife survived the Tsunami in Indonesia, now that experience would really get you questioning.....life.